Question for SD/Frogboy - Mod support

Hello,

I have a question that I think should get discussed: one of the clear strengths of Elemental is it's modding tools. However, as a potential modder (I've been playing around with Unity3D this last year and fancy getting involved in stuff), I'm put off using Elemental as its never going to have the market penetration that the Civ series will have. And given that only a fraction of players ever try mods, well, I'm left with a very limited potential audience.

And I know a lot of my gaming friends have read the Elemental reviews and concluded "that's a shame, it looked interesting, oh well, Civ5 is out next month." And while I believe SD will make good on the game, I'm not so sure that many of these gamers will come back next year and buy it.

So, my thoughts are:

Would Stardock consider mods to be distributed as standalone products via Impulse?

I'm interested to see what people think.

elemental

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And by this you mean I'd have to purchase these stand alone mods? My understanding of "stand alone" is that it could play without the core Elemental game, right?

I guess, in the end, if it were good enough, I'd buy anything.

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Yes (with Stardock obviously taking a large and fair cut). I'm assuming there would be a charge, but ideally, an option of releasing a mode for free would be nice too in an ideal world. but I understand that that's unlikely.

As if they don't do that, the potential audience is very limited (assuming that not many players actually try mods, and only a fraction of those who do will bother to try YOUR mod, and only a fraction of those will actually like it!).

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I guess you're talking about total conversion mods that have no relation whatsoever to copyrighted material like LOTR, MoM, or generally any books or movies...

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StevenAus22

Join Date 06/2010

+110

Civilization was a new game once.

Best regards,
Steven.

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Quoting Robert Hentschke,

reply 3

There's no need to discuss the practical details, I'm just putting the idea out there to see what people think of it in general terms.Obviously, this would only apply to total conversion mods (think FallFromHeaven2), rather than mods that tweak a few things here and there, and add a couple of techs, but don't change the core game.
I guess you're talking about total conversion mods that have no relation whatsoever to copyrighted material like LOTR, MoM, or generally any books or movies...

I was actually talking about the principle of the whole thing.

Scenario: I spend all my free time over the next year making a game/mod. I'm quite pleased with the result. I'd like people to try it. At the moment, I don't know anybody else who's bought Ele.... they're all getting Civ instead. And asking them to spend £40 on a game just to try my mod, well, that's a bit daft.

Ideally, I'd like to give it away for free, to see what they think. But I can't do this if I use Ele's engine.

This isn't an ideal situation. And Civ5 is going to sell a huge amount, most my friends are buying it, so maybe i'd be better modding that. Even if it's tools aren't as great. As at least then I can give people copies!

Or maybe I'm best just playing around trying to make a tbs game inside Unity3D. (Haven't many progress in quite a while though)

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